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23 Comments

Interesting motherboard. The OC emphasis and the included brace look to make it a pretty cool board for those wanting to up their OC efforts. Glad to hear it was reliable too, that is my primary consideration when purchasing a motherboard. :-)Reply

You obviously ignore the fact that there are college students with good hearing but restricted budgets. Of course those won't usually complain about the money save on the cheaper on-board sound either.Reply

BIOS F6, as per the images on the BIOS section of the review: http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/3144#19I only ever use retail BIOSes downloadable from the website, and never 'BIOSes for review'. I want my results to be the ones you guys see.The only way I ever take beta BIOSes is usually if there's something that is fundamentally broken, or it's prelaunch and the relevant download pages are not available. Then I always ask for something as near to the public launch BIOS as possible.These reviews are always snapshots in time, as BIOSes in the future could have various performance tweaks or a shift in policy with regard idle states/MultiCore Turbo.

This board is really compelling, I think the mix of OC features and mainstream price really speaks to enthusiasts (like us). It is a little sad that there is little reason to upgrade to an overclocked Haswell desktop from an overclocked Sandy or Ivy Bridge desktop because the Haswell chips just don't overclock as well so you end up with very similar performance after overclocking.

I'm personally not seeing any reason to upgrade from my current i5-2500 @ 4.7Ghz. Hopefully Intel will release something more exciting sometime soon. Maybe whatever is after Broadwell, which doesn't look very interesting either.Reply

With the last few generations, it's always been about 'have you got a good chip?'. A good OC chip of Ivy (or Sandy) has always been better than a bad chip this gen, and sometimes there isn't the certainty of getting a good chip this time around. That means the only jumps where it makes sense is when a bad chip in the newest gen beats your good chip. Each gen seems to give a 200-500 MHz IPC advantage (at 4GHz) depending on the CPU benchmark test (less in gaming), and you need to decide when that jump takes place if you're on the cutting edge of performance.

But if you had a bad chip/ran at stock, then perhaps every two generations it makes sense to upgrade due to the IPC benefits. There are some pretty awesome low power chips this generation for example.Reply

Another use for the on board USB2 ports would be a thumbdrive to store bitlocker full disk encryption keys since the board doesn't appear to include a TPM keystore. Using an external USB port for that strikes me as mildly dangerous since it would be easy for someone to accidentally borrow the drive for something else.Reply

It's different for everyone.. For me right now it's the G1 Sniper M5. While Anandtech has mentioned it I don't believe they've reviewed one yet.. I like the onboard sound/lan options which are not the generic Realtek stuff and tend to go matx.. but still want a board that's a cut above.. Asus also makes something similar in their Maximus6 Gene. Reply

Did your board include the updated version Intel C2 chipset? And: did Gigabyte change the board version to 1.1, in order to indicate the presence of the updated C2 chipset? The review's photo shows board version 1.0. Reply

I'm not sure what you mean by "for some reason only two of the chipset USB 3.0 ports are used. There are two USB 3.0 hubs for another eight USB 3.0 ports, and it seems..."

If they used all 6 PCH SATA ports and put the FlexIO into PCIe, then they have 4 USB 3.0 ports to work with. 2 of those are routed directly to a FP header and then the other 2 each go to 4 port hubs to give another FP header and 6 rear ports. Seems perfectly logical and maximizes the available configuration.g\Reply